Black History Month Seminar Series, 2014

Date: 8th October 2014, 12:30 - 1:30 Location: Room 12.21 Social Sciences Building Bobby Sayyid This talk is based on a provocation which begins with the claim that “racism is more objected to than understood in sociology” (Hesse, 2016).  The talk goes on to question what is the object that is being objected to within the sociology of racism and what does it tell us about the nature of sociological enterprise and its relationship to the post-racial.

Date: 15th October 2014 Shirley Anne Tate Black liberation thought is foundational for Black Critical Race Theory (BCRT) which in turn is crucial for unpicking the operation of white power in organizations. ‘I just can’t quite put my finger on it’ engages with the struggle to identify racism’s invisible touch.

Date: 22nd October 2014, 12.30 - 1.30 Shona Hunter In this talk I do some self positioning work in relation to my own relationship to my work on whiteness as a positioning of relationally enacted power/agency which entails responsibility for and vulnerability in the face of racialising practices.

Date: 22nd October 2014, 4:00 - 6:00 pm. Suriya Nayal - University of Salford In this paper I seek to understand something of the personal, political task of doing intersectionality for myself and within myself - on the embodied emotional experience of the aporia of intersectionality.

Date: 29th October Dionne van Reenen - Institute for Reconciliation and Social Justice, University of the Free State, South Africa This study makes use of stakeholder interviews, media reports and papers on the subject of ‘Reitz’ in order to make some sense of the content and context of a protest video concerning racial segregfation in  the student residences at the University of the Free State made in 2007 (and made public in 2008), and why its impact on higher education transformation in South Africa was so significant.